Stewart R. Mott, the political activist and philanthropist who died last week, was a consistent supporter of the FAS Project on Government Secrecy.
A man of many appetites, he seemed to derive pleasure from giving away money to support causes he believed in. Luckily for us, open and accountable government was one of those causes. For fifteen years, he sent us checks that helped anchor and sustain this Project and Secrecy News.
“The disadvantages of being wealthy are, in my experience, few,” he told Tim Weiner of the New York Times in a video interview from 2006.
A June 14 Times obituary, “Stewart R. Mott, 70, Offbeat Philanthropist, Dies,” by Douglas Martin, captures some of his eccentricities and his willful non-conformism.
But his capacity for kindness, not his flamboyance, was his most attractive quality. We are in his debt.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.